Financial services providers are exposed to a highly turbulent environment that is characterized by an intense competition for the development of new financial products and the attraction of customers. Against this background, Grid technology assimilation can be assumed to be a potential strategic response to address fast changing market demands and to enhance the operational agility of business processes. This article presents the results of a quantitative field study conducted to analyze to what extent Grid assimilation impacts on the agility of business processes as well as the role of environmental turbulence in the Grid assimilation process. The research model was validated based on 178 responses from senior IT decision makers of financial services providers in the U.S. that have already adopted Grid technology. The results from partial least squares analyses suggest that environmental turbulence significantly moderates the relationship between Grid assimilation and operational agility.

One might think that the success of a financial investment can be measured easily as performance, defined as the return-on-investment between two points in time. However, the accurate calculation can be complex and compute-intensive, e.g., for a single customer but especially
for the entire customer base of large institutions like banks. In
order to meet these computational demands, grid computing presents
a secure, reliable and scalable technology to provide shared access to
heterogeneous resources. This research-in-progress paper introduces a service-oriented architecture for portfolio performance measurement that is based on a grid layer. It first emphasizes the importance of performance measurement as success measure and steering tool before the calculation is presented in detail. Since the consolidation of required data is very compute-intensive, different
calculation methods are encapsulated. Finally, a service-oriented grid architecture for performance measurement is presented and evaluated using criteria from system engineering and design science.

The financial service industry is one among other industries that request increasingly the use of Grid technology for their intensive computing demand. An achievable way to accelerate the sharing of Grid resources within this sector is the establishment of a pricing mechanism. To strengthen this theory, a simulation with different pricing scenarios has been set up with the indication that price-based allocation of Grid-resources combined with an auction mechanism can lead to a cost reduction of more than 40%. This result
shows that there is a huge cost reduction potential in the financial services industry.

The exchange of transportation capacities is an approach that is well established in the practice of logistics. Few of these mostly web-based market places, however, are able to take into consideration the synergies that can be generated by the appropriate combination of the transportation lanes of different carriers. One method of achieving this is to employ combinatorial auctions, that allow bidding on bundles of lanes. This article deals with a combinatorial auction for the intra-enterprise exchange of logistics services. In the real world case considered here, we implement and analyze such an exchange process in an enterprise that is related to the food sector and organized in a profit center structure. In the intra-enterprise exchange process, each profit center is able to release delivery contracts for outsourcing, if the geographic location of a customer allows reduced-cost delivery by another profit center in the neighborhood. However, the success of such an exchange system depends on the incentive for the profit centers to release delivery contracts into the outsourcing process. This incentive is given by a distribution mechanism that enables the profit centers to share the cost savings achieved for the entire enterprise. We demonstrate the effect of the distribution mechanism by employing a simulation that is based on our real world delivery data. The proposed mechanism rewards the insourcing of delivery contracts by awarding a higher share of the total cost savings to a profit center if the insourcing produces additional costs for that profit center.